WETA-TV (channel 26) is the primary

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...

member Member may refer to: * Military jury, referred to as "Members" in military jargon * Element (mathematics), an object that belongs to a mathematical set * In object-oriented programming, a member of a class ** Field (computer science), entries in ...

television station A television station is a set of equipment managed by a business, organisation or other entity, such as an amateur television (ATV) operator, that transmits video content and audio content via radio waves directly from a transmitter on the earth ...

Washington, D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, ...

Owned by the Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association, it is a

sister station In broadcasting, sister stations or sister channels are radio or television stations operated by the same company, either by direct ownership or through a management agreement. Radio sister stations will often have different formats, and somet ...

NPR National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...

member WETA (90.9 FM). The two outlets share studios in nearby

Arlington County, Virginia Arlington County is a County (United States), county in the Virginia, Commonwealth of Virginia. The county is situated in Northern Virginia on the southwestern bank of the Potomac River directly across from the Washington, D.C., District of Co ...

; WETA-TV's transmitter is located in the

Tenleytown Tenleytown is a historic neighborhood in Northwest, Washington, D.C. History In 1790, locals began calling the neighborhood "Tennally's Town" after area tavern owner John Tennally. Over time, the spelling has evolved and by the 19th century th ...

neighborhood in Northwest Washington. WETA-TV also effectively, but unofficially serves as one of three flagship stations of PBS, alongside

WGBH-TV WGBH-TV (channel 2), branded on-air as GBH or GBH 2 since 2020, is the primary PBS member television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship property of the WGBH Educational Foundation, which also owns Boston's se ...

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

and

WNET WNET (channel 13), branded on-air as "Thirteen" (stylized as "THIRTEEN"), is a primary PBS member television station licensed to Newark, New Jersey, United States, serving the New York City area. Owned by The WNET Group (formerly known as the ...

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. Among the programs produced by WETA-TV that are distributed nationally by PBS are the ''

PBS NewsHour ''PBS NewsHour'' is an American evening television news program broadcast on over 350 PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virg ...

'', ''

Washington Week ''Washington Week''—previously ''Washington Week in Review''—is an American public affairs television program, which has aired on PBS and its predecessor, National Educational Television, since 1967. Unlike other panel discussion shows which ...

'', and several cultural and documentary programs, such as the Ken Burns documentaries and ''

A Capitol Fourth ''A Capitol Fourth'' is an annual Independence Day concert special broadcast by PBS. It is presented from the west lawn of the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., and is also simulcast by NPR and the American Forces Network. The ...

''.

History

In 1952, the

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdiction ...

(FCC) allocated 242 channels for non-commercial use across the United States; channel 26 was allocated for use in Washington, D.C. In 1953, the Greater Washington Educational Television Association (GWETA) was formed to file for a channel 26 construction permit, joining the D.C. Board of Education. The Board of Education would drop its bid in 1954. GWETA credits Elizabeth Campbell with having founded the organization. In the early days, before it was granted a license for its own channel, GWETA produced educational programming for WMAL-TV and

WTTG WTTG (channel 5) is a television station in Washington, D.C., airing programming from the Fox network. It is owned and operated by the network's Fox Television Stations division alongside MyNetworkTV outlet WDCA (channel 20). WTTG and WDCA sh ...

. An application was finally filed on May 3, 1961, and approved on June 12, for a construction permit for the channel. GWETA was eventually granted a license by the FCC to activate channel 26; WETA-TV first signed on the air on October 2, 1961, with the first televised class being aired on October 16. WETA originally operated out of Yorktown High School in Arlington; the station later relocated its operations to the campus of

Howard University Howard University (Howard) is a private, federally chartered historically black research university in Washington, D.C. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity" and accredited by the Middle States Commissi ...

in 1964. Rapid growth led a station that had been described as having "a rough time meeting the monthly bills" in 1963 to even pursue thoughts of a second channel in 1965. In 1967, WETA began producing ''Washington Week in Review'' (now simply titled ''

''), a political discussion program that became the station's first program to be syndicated nationally to other non-commercial educational stations and is now the network's longest-running public affairs program. Around 1970, the Greater Washington Educational Television Association changed its name to the Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association to reflect the oversight of the new

WETA (FM) WETA (90.9 FM) is a non-commercial, public FM radio station licensed to serve Washington, D.C., broadcasting a classical music format. Its studios are located in Arlington, Virginia and its broadcast tower is located near Arlington at (). WET ...

. In 1972, the producing organization National Public Affairs Center for Television merged into WETA. In 1992, WETA broadcast the first publicized over-the-air

high-definition television High-definition television (HD or HDTV) describes a television system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since 1936; in more recent times, it refers to the g ...

signal in the United States. In 1995, WETA acquired CapAccess, an interactive computer network. From that acquisition, WETA helped connect public schools, public libraries and local government agencies to the Internet. In 1996, WETA launched its first national educational project, LD Online, a website that seeks to help children and adults reach their full potential by providing accurate and up-to-date information and advice about

learning disabilities Learning disability, learning disorder, or learning difficulty (British English) is a condition in the brain that causes difficulties comprehending or processing information and can be caused by several different factors. Given the "difficult ...

and ADHD. It was joined in 2001 by Reading Rockets, a

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradition ...

project offering information and resources on how young kids learn to

read Read Read may refer to: * Reading, human cognitive process of decoding symbols in order to construct or derive meaning * Read (automobile), an American car manufactured from 1913 to 1915 * Read (biology), an inferred sequence of base pairs of ...

, why so many struggle, and how caring adults can help. In 2003, Reading Rockets spun off Colorín Colorado, a free web-based service that provides information, activities, and advice for educators, and

Spanish-speaking Hispanophone and Hispanic refers to anything relating to the Spanish language (the Hispanosphere). In a cultural, rather than merely linguistic sense, the notion of "Hispanophone" goes further than the above definition. The Hispanic culture is th ...

families of English language learners (ELLs). To support the parents and educators of older students who struggle with reading, WETA launched Adlit.org in 2007. AdLit.org is a multimedia educational initiative offering research (articles, instructional strategies, school-based outreach events, professional development webcasts, and book recommendation) to develop teens' literacy skills, prevent school dropouts, and prepare students for the demands of college. Seeing a need to educate the public about brain injuries, in 2008 WETA, in partnership with the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, launched BrainLine.org. The site features videos, webcasts, recent research, personal stories, and articles on preventing, treating, and living with

traumatic brain injuries A traumatic brain injury (TBI), also known as an intracranial injury, is an injury to the brain caused by an external force. TBI can be classified based on severity (ranging from mild traumatic brain injury TBI/concussionto severe traumatic ...

. In 1997, WETA tested its new full-power digital transmitter by broadcasting the first-ever high definition telecast of a live

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...

game to the

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; the digital facility was activated for full-time broadcasting in November 1998. With the national closure of the

PBS Kids PBS Kids is the brand for most of the children's programming aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States. Some public television children's programs are not produced by PBS member stations or transmitted by PBS. Instead, ...

network in 2005, WETA did not become a

PBS Kids Sprout Universal Kids is an American children's television channel owned by the NBCUniversal Television and Streaming unit of Comcast's NBCUniversal. The channel launched on September 26, 2005, as PBS Kids Sprout, a preschool-oriented channel jointly ...

partner. By April 2006, the station had added

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programming to a subchannel prior to its January 2007 launch as a nationwide network. In 2007, WETA started broadcasting a children's channel. In February 2009, WETA only aired a daily three-hour children's morning block on its primary channel, clearing the afternoon for general audience programs like ''Charlie Rose'', travel shows, repeats of the previous night's prime time shows, movies, documentaries, and miniseries. WETA decided to drop Create due to the network moving to being fee-based on July 1, 2012 and perceived lack of programming flexibility. WETA How-To lifestyle programming replaced Create in January 2012. How-To was replaced by WETA UK on July 4, 2012 after an analysis of audience and local viewers' demand for British programs.

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's digital channel is

multiplexed In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource - a ...

: Channel 26.2, "WETA UK", is a subchannel programmed in-house with a schedule of shows produced in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

. Channel 26.5, "WETA Metro", is also produced in-house and focuses on timeshifted rebroadcasts of news programming and reruns that interest a local audience.

Analog-to-digital conversion

WETA-TV shut down its analog signal, on UHF channel 26, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal continued to broadcasts on its pre-transition UHF channel 27. Through the use of

PSIP The Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP) is the MPEG (a video and audio industry group) and privately defined program-specific information originally defined by General Instrument for the DigiCipher 2 system and later extended for the AT ...

, digital television receivers display the station's

virtual channel In most telecommunications organizations, a virtual channel is a method of remapping the ''program number'' as used in H.222 Program Association Tables and Program Mapping Tables to a channel number that can be entered via digits on a receiver's ...

as its former UHF analog channel 26.

History

Technical information

Subchannels

Analog-to-digital conversion

References

External links